Shattered

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

About the Author

Chapter
One

“Kaela!” my boss called from the kitchen,
“Stop moping and take out the garbage.”

My fingers tightened around the edge of the
counter. It took every ounce of willpower I possessed not to fly
off the handle and say something I’d later regret. “You got it,” I
muttered, turning my back on the nearly empty coffee shop. We were
just about to close up for the night, and the only people in sight
were a couple of regulars who stuck around the place like bugs on
flypaper. Usually, I got to close up on my own, or with one of my
co-workers. But tonight, the boss had stayed late to deal with
inventory. So instead of meandering through my closing duties as
usual, I’d have to play the good soldier until I could finally go
home and get some rest.

I shuffled over to the garbage can and
hoisted up the bag, heavy as it was with sodden coffee grounds. No
one could say with a shred of sincerity that our shop had the best
coffee in the city. We served the cheapest coffee the boss could
find, but our regulars didn’t seem to mind. Located in Alphabet
City in New York, we weren’t exactly on the beaten path, and relied
on the locals to keep us open. My boss, Buddy, was an ex-cop who
had established a sort of rapport with the neighborhood guys. Our
coffee shop was definitely something of a boys club—a fact I’d only
become savvy to once I’d already taken the job. Had I known the
extent to which machismo reigned supreme there, I may have thought
twice about accepting the post. But I’d stumbled into the joint
when I was flat broke, straight out of college, and terrified about
paying rent—a vulnerable time for even the iron-willed.

Slinging the garbage bag over my shoulder, I
tried to remind myself that this was only a temporary situation.
Unfortunately, my mantra was getting more and more difficult to buy
into. I had arrived in New York City three years earlier as a
bright-eyed twenty two year old. I’d just graduated from college
and thought, naively, that the world would have some great
adventure in store for me. I didn’t have any particular career path
in mind when I relocated to the city, but my only other option had
been moving back in with my parents in Podunk Ohio, so I decided to
take my chances.

It hadn’t taken long for the brutal reality
of my situation to knock me on my ass. Two months after moving to
the city, I had made no progress with the job hunt. I sent out
resumes like a madwoman, reaching out to any place that might have
me. But it turned out that no one was itching to hire a green
little lady with a liberal arts degree. Who knew? I had nearly
blown through my savings and needed a job, any job. That was when I
stumbled into Joe’s.

Joe was my boss, and the fact that he named
the shop after himself should have been a good indicator of his
narcissism and loathsome attitude. But in my desperation for a job,
any job, I overlooked his grimy qualities and essentially begged
for a barista post. I lived just up the street, was willing to work
any hours, and boasted a pretty nice set of curves—Joe had hired me
on the spot. Before I knew it, I was slinging coffee to dirty old
men and degenerates of all walks of life. So much for living the
dream.

I was the only woman on staff at Joe’s, and
it didn’t take me long to figure out why. The coffee shop was a
hotbed of sexual harassment and other detestable nonsense. I had
been initiated during my first shift when Joe asked me point blank
whether I’d be interested in heading back to his place to snort
some coke off his cock. I was completely blindsided that first day,
but quickly learned how to deal with my coworkers’ bullshit. I had
a zero tolerance policy for any kind of touching, and would spit
back at any cat call that got tossed my way.

As sad as it is to say, I got used to the
sexist attitudes in the coffee shop pretty quickly. It wasn’t hard
to do in a city like New York. Everywhere I went, no matter the
neighborhood, hoots and whistles followed me. Men called out their
love for my plump ass, my 34-C’s, my head of dirty blonde curls.
This blunt street harassment had taken me by surprise at first. I'm
from a tiny, conservative town in central Ohio and I went to a
college with a secluded campus. I knew to expect sexist shenanigans
from frat boys, but adult men? That had thrown me for a loop.

I expected to meet a very different sort of
man in New York City. The type I fantasized about, when I let
myself fantasize at all, wouldn’t have to prove his manliness with
catcalls and game of grab ass behind the coffee shop counter. His
very existence would be testament enough to his manliness. The kind
of man I wanted wouldn’t waste any words, and certainly wouldn’t
waste time chasing down random women on the street. He wouldn’t
have to. I wanted a man who knew what he wanted and wasn’t afraid
to take it. These fools with their passive aggressive, cowardly
antics only repulsed me.

But that didn’t mean that I repulsed them,
unfortunately. As I slogged through the kitchen to deposit the
trash in the dumpster, Joe and the line cook, Ace, let their
conversation drop so they could better eye my tits through the
modest cotton tee shirt I was wearing. There was no stopping them,
and by then I’d tried everything—ratty clothes, greasy hair, no
makeup...Nothing could deter their persistent harassment, their
lingering, raking, hungry eyes. They were like dogs with a
particularly curvy bone.

“Slow down,” Joe sneered, “We want to take a
nice long look at that ass.”

“You’ll get a nice long look at the back of
my hand if you keep it up,” I shot back.

“Temper, temper,” Ace said, condescendingly,
“I thought you were supposed to be a lady?”

“Only among gentlemen,” I said, “And god
knows, there aren’t any to be found around this dump.”

 “Watch it,” Joe said, “This dump has
been paying your rent for the last three years. How quickly they
forget...”

I bit my tongue; swallowing the venomous
words I so longed to throw my boss’s way. The worst part of his
ribbing was that he was right; I had been living off my wages from
the coffee shop for years. I had to work such long hours to make
ends meet that almost every other aspect of my life had ground to a
halt. I hadn’t had time to send out more resumes—searching for a
job was practically a full-time job in and of itself, after all. I
hadn’t made many friends in New York, except for Aimee, the
roommate I had taken on to help pay the bills. And even she wasn’t
so much a friend as someone who had just simply answered my
Craigslist ad. My love life had been abysmal since leaving college.
I’d put a few notches in my bedpost since becoming a city girl, but
there had been no relationships to speak of. As much as I hated to
admit it, Joe’s was pretty much all I had going for me. And Joe
himself knew it.

With my features arranged into an adamant
scowl, I pushed past my coworkers, trying my best to ignore their
snickering. I kicked open the back door and stormed out into the
night. It was a warm spring evening, the kind I might like to spend
in the park, watching the sunset with a good book. But instead, I
was making my way through a gross alleyway with a bag full of
garbage. The fact that I had once thought of New York as a
fashionable, glamorous place to live was laughable. As a tiny
rebellion against Joe and all his cronies, I decided to take a
little smoke break before heading back inside. Leaning against the
brick wall of the alley, I pulled a pack of cigarettes from the
back pocket of my low-rise jeans and helped myself. I lit the smoke
and took a long pull, savoring that lovely first drag. After a long
shift of pretending to care about people’s precious latte
preferences, a well-earned cigarette is like a gift from the
gods.